


Little Thief

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Book 03: Oathbringer Spoilers, Fluff, Gen, I tried to write Lift, Lift meets Rock, Post-Book 03: Oathbringer, and I probably failed but not as bad as I could have, and tries to steal his food, he is a terrible enabler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-09 03:23:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14708183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Lift tries to steal from Bridge Four's kitchen. Rock feeds her anyway.





	Little Thief

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to do something with Lift and Rock for a while now, so here we are. Lift was kind of hard to write, so I might do more of these in the future for practice. Also, Rock's speech style was difficult to mimic. Why did I pick two characters I knew would be difficult? Because I love them.

Gawx and Dalinar must have been talking for _hours_ now. Lift was starving just waiting for them to get to the point. She fidgeted in her seat, and stealthily surveyed the room for food, but it was empty. At first she held out hope that servers would come with food, but the longer she sat there listening to her stomach grumble the more she realized that Mr. Tight Butt really cared about security. At least, he cared enough to not have servers in and out.

It felt like there was thunder in her belly, and more and more hungerspren were popping up around her. Could no one else hear it? Weren’t they the least bit hungry? They’d been at this for hours now!

Well, if Mr. Tight Butt wasn’t going to provide food, she’d go steal it herself.

As slowly as she could she inched up and out of her chair. She was seated far enough back that she was pretty sure she could get out of here without anybody noticing, provided she didn’t draw too much attention. She didn’t stand up straight; if she did that, someone would notice that she’d stood up. Instead, she stayed crouched like she was sitting and told her quivering muscles to hang in there if they wanted food.

Carefully, she slicked up the bottoms of her feet so she wouldn’t have to walk. The floor was so hard, if she walked, her footsteps would probably give her away. Slowly, every muscled tense enough to hold her upper body immobile, she slid over to the doorway.

Lift slipped around the corner, out of sight of everyone in the conference room. Safe. Now she just needed to find the kitchens. Wyndle wove around her legs, fretting in that quiet, easily-ignorable way of his, but she was too nimble to trip over him, so it didn’t really matter.

“Mistress, we’ve been warned several times to be careful! You can’t just slide around whichever corner you see first, people get lost here all the time!” His vines tried surged after her. “And this place can be _dangerous_ ! They stumbled over one of the _Unmade_ in the _basement_!”

His vines grew after her in long surges. For all his whining and complaining, he was keeping pace with her just fine.

“I won’t get lost. Someone around here will know where the kitchens are, and I’m a starvin’ Radiant. They’ll trip over their own tongue giving me directions. And there’s nothing scary about a kitchen. Even if there was a real Voidbringer hiding in the pantry or something, one of the ones from the stories, not a silly one like you, the you could just tip it over into a pot and cook it into soup. Say, what do you think Voidbringer tastes like?”

The leaves on Wyndle’s vines shuddered like heavy curtains in the dregs of a highstorm, when it was still windy but not enough to keep folks inside if they didn’t want to be.

“I hope never to find out, Mistress. I’d hate to see what sort of stormlight you’d make from a meal like that.”

The stone floor was cool and almost smooth under her bare toes. She was tempted to slick up the soles of her feet with her awesomeness and slip down the hallways like the stone had suddenly become ice that had just begun to melt, but she was also hungry. Wyndle got on her case when she used her awesomeness on an empty stomach, and his nagging was distracting. So until she sound out where the kitchens were, snail’s pace it was.

That was the best thing about knowing important people- the food. Not just good food, good food all the time. No need to be awesome even when her stomach grumbled for food. No danger of ever running out of awesomeness.

Whenever she came to a turn or smaller passage, she took it. Gawx and Mr. Tight Butt were important people in charge of making rules for an entire country, so it stood to reason that the further she got from their super special meeting room, the closer she’d get to the kitchens, where the _really_ important stuff happened.

When she judged she was far enough away, she slid to a stop behind a woman in uniform who looked official enough to know stuff, but not so important that she’d have weird rich-people manners that Lift didn’t know about. She rose up onto her toes and tapped the woman on the shoulder.

She turned around. It took her a few heartbeats to recognize Lift, but once she did her polite but disinterested expression melted into recognition and awe.

“Yes, Radiant?”

“Do you know where the kitchens are?”

“Of course, Radiant. Which ones are you looking for?”

Lift’s brain stumbled. Which _ones_? There were multiple kitchens in this place? No wonder everyone kept kowtowing to Dalinar, he had enough multiple kitchens!

But she had to give this woman an answer or she’d walk off. She probably had things she was supposed to be doing, if she was in uniform. Part of her wanted to ask for directions to all of them, but she wouldn’t be able to remember more than a few sets of directions. Besides, there would be time to get food from them all, of course, if Gawx’s negotiations continued at their current pace.

“Which one’s closest?”

“To the left, down the corridor, up a flight of stairs, through the big wooden doors, and on your right.”

Lift nodded appreciatively. That was close enough that she could probably be a little awesome on the way there! She nodded to the woman, then slid off in the direction she’d pointed with hungerspren trailing behind her.

* * *

The corridor was long and straight, so Lift could slide down it at top speed. It made her stomach gurgle a bit to use such a strong burst of awesomeness, but that was okay, food was on the way. Her hair streamed out behind her like a waving flag and Wyndle shouted after her as he struggled to keep up. Part of that might have been the joyspren swirling behind her like little blue leaves that eventually hit the ground and blocked his path. She laughed and kept going.

Maybe she could talk Gawx into doing this. He was getting more and more tense with each war council or negotiation he went to. He probably needed a little fun soon, or his muscles would tense up so much he couldn’t move them and he’d turn into a statue. He wasn’t awesome like her, but if he took off his shoes he could probably slide all right in his socks.

As the stairs approached, she crouched down a little and started angling her body towards the bannister. It was cut from the same dark stone as the steps, and was flat and about a small hand’s length wide. The sort of bannister regal ladies could rest their hands on as they walked slowly enough that they didn’t trip over their long skirts. By her eye, it was probably big enough to slide on.

Just before she reached it, she jumped and landed in a crouch on the bannister. Her momentum carried her forward, up the long line of stone. She wobbled a bit, then slicked up her hand and set it down in front of her keep steady. She flew past the steps at a speed she couldn’t have achieved even if she were sprinting up them.

Then, the bannister abruptly curved into the wall and the stairs ended. Lift tried to turn off her awesomeness, but it was too late. She flew off the end and fell in a crumpled heap on the floor.

Wyndle grew up the side of the stairway, leaves of light shaking back and forth in the way Lift had started interpreting as her spren shaking his head.

“Mistress, are you alright?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lift muttered as she heaved herself back up. A single sickly-looking painspren bloomed then disappeared. “I’ll just have to keep trying until I get it. Practice and all that, right?”

Wyndle’s vines shook in horror.

“Mistress, please! The world is ending, the Voidbringers have returned, hateful forces gather, you’ve been seen by Odium himself, and you want to spend your time sliding uncontrollably fast up curved bannisters? Are you trying to tempt fate? Mistress, I understand that you are young, and that you insist you always will be, but death can come for youth just as easily as for age! Please, Mistress-”

Lift swiped her hands over her pants to get the wrinkles out, then set off in the middle of Wyndle’s lecture. He was just being silly again. She wasn’t going to die falling up a bunch of stairs.

The big wooden doors were already open when she reached them, and sure enough, just inside and to the right was a kitchen. It wasn’t quite what she’d pictured when she thought of a royal kitchen, though. It was kind of small; not nearly large enough to feed a starvin’ castle. Well, she _had_ asked for the closest kitchen. Perhaps the big ones were further away.

And this one smelled _good_. There was a big pot over in the corner, and the steam wafting gently from inside brought with it a smell like a giant welcoming hug. That soup must be fantastic. Unfortunately, Lift didn’t have a bowl, or a cup or anything, and even if she did it was hard to run with soup. It sloshed all over the place and spilled all over the floor and then no one could eat it. Stealing soup was a waste, was what it was.

After taking another deep breath to trap the scent of the soup in her lungs, she darted around the pot to a set of cupboards and shelves. There was probably bread or something back here that she could steal to munch on while she looked for the real kitchens.

Something collided with her shoulder and she stumbled. A hand wrapped around her shoulder and shoved her into a wall.

She frantically twisted and called on her awesomeness, but it didn’t do any good. It was like her back had been glued to the wall.

Wyndle appeared next to her feet and wriggled around in a panic. For once, Lift felt the same way.

“Hello there, Little Thief. You have done me big insult, you know. What are you thinking, to try to take bread when I put work in the soup? Airsick lowlander, this bread, it is no good with no soup!”

An enormous Horneater wearing a pink, soup-stained apron shook his head at her. He didn’t try to take the bread back from her, though. Instead, he bowed deeply to her feet, said ‘this kitchen is honored by your presence, ali’i’kamurai’, and then began puttering around the kitchen as though she wasn’t even there. He shuffled between the soup pot and the cupboards, grabbing a bowl and spoon, then carefully ladling soup into the bowl. Then he rummaged around in a drawer full of mismatched, patched napkins. The one he ended up choosing was the same color as his apron.

Lift kept struggling against whatever was holding her stuck against the wall, but in a more curious way. It wasn’t vital that she escape right this second. The Horneater man seemed to be preparing food, and if food was involved she could stick around. Besides, she was a starvin’ Radiant, this cook couldn’t do anything to her!

Unless he was a Radiant too. That would explain how he stuck her to the wall.

At last he turned around.

“Here, eat this thing right way. Soup and bread together!”

Cautiously, she took it. Was it a trap? He didn’t seem like the sort to trap somebody like this. After a few seconds deliberation, her stomach complained about the wait, and she made up her mind. Food was worth a possible trap. If nothing else, it would give her more awesomeness to draw on should she need to escape.

She couldn’t sit properly with her back stuck to the wall, but her hands were free to accept the bowl. She ignored the spoon. Instead, she lifted the bowl directly to her mouth and sipped. The flavor wasn’t anything like what she’d tasted before. It was spicy enough to burn all the way down her throat, but in a good way. Underneath the burn was something strong that had been diluted with water, but she didn’t know what. Some sort of strange Alethi food? If so, she’d have to steal some before she left. There were occasional chunks like little rocks carried downstream by the current that caught on her teeth. She tried to swallow those whole too, but one of them caught painfully in her throat, so she began chewing them.

Once she’d eaten it all, she lowered the bowl.

The Horneater man laughed long and loud. She relaxed some more. He sounded warm, and warm people like that were less likely to turn in thieves, in her experience. She relaxed a bit more.

“Little Thief, you did it wrong again! You should eat soup and bread together. But I like you. You drink whole bowl without coming up for air! I can do this thing too, but you are a lowlander, you need air all the time. That compliment can make up for your bread insult. Here, I will serve more, and you eat it right this time.”

He took her bowl back and refilled it.

“What is Little Thief doing in Bridge Four’s barracks, hmm? I think that Kaladin would tell us if he let little thing like you join. But you have ali’i’kamura with you, so maybe you belong here with us.”

A spren Lift had never seen before appeared behind him, and he bowed to it like he had to Wyndle. Wyndle’s vines curled in interest, but he stayed at Lift’s side. Lift, on the other hand, wasn’t scared anymore.

“I got bored listening to Gawx and Dalinar talk,” she remembered at the last minute to call him by his real name, “and I got hungry, so I came looking for food. One of the servant ladies pointed me here.”

“I see. Well, no one can leave my kitchen still hungry. Eat, Little Thief. If Kaladin comes back and you are still here, I will tell him you have a ali’i’kamura too.”

Lift went to do a victory dance, but was pulled up short by her back, which was still stuck to the wall. She felt like one of those little shelled creatures that stuck themselves to the bottoms of boats and the sides of docks and big, slow creatures and used little tentacles the size of her eyelashes to pull food out of the water.

“Can you let me down?”

The man suddenly looked sheepish.

“I do not know how.”


End file.
